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Metal Gear Rising Revengeance is a major departure from the franchise’s stealth roots.

With Bayonetta developer Platinum Games at the helm, Revengeance is a fast-paced, action-packed swordfighting game. While it may not be the Metal Gear we know and love, it’s still one of the best action titles I’ve played in the last few years.

Despite its short campaign, which lasts anywhere from six to nine hours depending on how well you play and whether you watch all the cut-scenes, Revengeance packs in a ton of action and all but guarantees you’ll take it for a second spin, or at least take its numerous VR missions for a spin even after the credits roll.

The boss fights, in particular, comprise a huge portion of the game. And while the regular enemies may not provide a terrible amount of challenge or variety, the bosses are outstanding.

Combat in Revengeance is highly stylized, and it’s certainly not as deep as a game like Bayonetta or some of the games in the Devil May Cry series. Unless you play on the highest difficulty setting, button-mashing is often enough to get past normal enemies. More skill and precision is required for boss fights.

Parrying and blocking are some of the most important aspects of melee combat in Revengeance. Some will no doubt find this irritating, but I enjoyed it a great deal. I also liked the fact that dodging was off the table, requiring you to really focus on using your sword to ward off incoming attacks.

Then again, I’m pretty obsessed with defense when it comes to action games—I’m prone to lament the disregard given to shields in so many games—so a strong, if somewhat clunky, parrying system is music to my ears.

Revengeance also introduces Blade Mode, in which the world temporarily slows down in order for Raiden to slice and dice his enemies into dozens of little pieces. Think bullet mode but with a sword.

This is also a great way to replenish health; by timing and positioning your strikes just right, you can pluck the cybertronic life-force right out of an enemy. Later on in the game you can also tap into your darker side, invoking your Jack the Ripper alter-ego which gives you an extra combat boost for a short period of time.

There are some annoying camera angle issues, but by and large these are no worse than many other third-person action games, and you get used to the camera controls as you progress.

I’m also a bit ambivalent about Ninja Run, which basically allows Raiden to run and jump and slide through obstacles simply by holding down a button and moving forward. In Ninja Run mode, Raiden can also deflect incoming bullets and, occasionally, go veering off a high building to his death.

It’s actually pretty fun, and gives you a great sense of freedom, but I think it’s wasted on the straightforward level design.

The game’s real shortcomings are its lack of variety in both level design and enemies.

While the boss fights largely avoid this pitfall, the rest of the game feels too two-dimensional. There are nowhere near enough different types of enemies and the levels are too linear and uninteresting. Given how much effort went into making combat look amazing, it’s too bad the levels and enemies fell flat.

There’s also some irritating limitations on what I, as a player, can make Raiden do.

In a cut-scene, Raiden can scale walls and leap from missile to incoming missile. In the game, I’m never able to run along walls Prince of Persia style.

I can still do some pretty fancy moves, but I feel less like a super-human cyborg ninja with controller in hand than I do watching this other Raiden make his daring leaps. Metal Gear games are always guilty of this sort of thing, and Revengeance is no exception.

I actually don’t mind the quick-time-events in this game, either, which make up a small portion (often a finishing move) of the boss fights, and control your timing for finishers in normal combat. They simply don’t detract from the pace of combat as much as QTEs often do.

Metal Gear Rising’s story is as fast-paced as the game, and is relayed through a number of entertaining cut-scenes which more than make up for its ludonarrative dissonance. The story is also pushed forward through conversations between Raiden and various other characters, including your giant AI dog “Wolf.”

You can skip cut-scenes if you want, and you can fast-forward through most conversations.

Of course, the story is over-the-top and absurd and tries too hard to be relevant.

The “War on Terror” and 9/11 are referenced, as are WMDs in Iraq. It all feels a bit out of place in this cyborgian future of PMCs, privatized police forces, and super-advanced technology. The final boss is incoherent, though the game is smart enough to state that explicitly, and there’s an underlying sense of humor that makes the story more palatable.

Raiden himself is a surprisingly fun protagonist.

He’s in turns earnest and, when his sociopathic alter-ego emerges, frighteningly bloodthirsty. But best of all, he’s basically a young Clint Eastwood, if Clint Eastwood were a ninja cyborg designed by a Japanese game developer.

All the over-the-top action and melodrama is so much more fun when you view the whole thing as a Spaghetti Western, or a Dirty Harry movie.

On top of the single-player campaign there are dozens of VR missions to play.

These range in both challenge and reward, and provide quite a bit of extra combat practice. VR missions unlock as you play through the game, as do a number of secondary weapons dropped by bosses such as a ridiculously clever pole-arm and slow, but powerful, pincer blade.

You can also unlock skills and costumes and spend credits to boost your stats.

All told, Revengeance is a short but very replayable, action title.

It’s no Metal Gear Solid, but it’s a great diversion from the stealth genre that has defined the franchise. Better still, no matter how different the game is from its predecessors, it still feels right at home in the Metal Gear universe.

If nothing else, it should keep you busy chopping things up into little pieces until Ground Zeroes comes out.

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